The (analytic) philosophy of photography came into its own relatively recently, in the early 1980's. Since then, philosophical theorising about photography has largely been preoccupied with three issues: 1. Are photographs transparent; that is, is seeing a photograph (and related photographic media, like film and television) a way of indirectly seeing photographed objects? 2. How should one respond to scepticism about photography's aesthetic value? 3. In what does the peculiar epistemic value of photography consist? More recently, attention has turned towards a number of other issues, including: 4. What is the correct ontological category in which to locate photographs? 5. In what does the peculiar affective power of photographs consist? 6. How does digital photography challenge extant answers to questions 1-5. Answering these questions has involved philosophers drawing on related research in aesthetics concerning: pictorial experience and theories of depiction; fictionality; standards of correctness and interpretive norms more broadly; aesthetic value; and artist's intention. But philosophers interested in the philosophy of photography have also drawn on issues further afield, including: issues in the philosophy of action; information-theoretic accounts of mental content; sense-data and the possibility of indirect perception; necessary conditions for perception; and the nature of causation.

Key works

The locus classicus for the theory of photographic transparency is Walton 1984. Although Walton's concern is the affect of photographs, the principal influence of this paper, apart from its prompting numerous replies in response to the idea of transparency itself, was its spawning the literature on the epistemic value of photographs. Walton's paper is best understood when read in conjunction with the postscript in Walton 2008, which clarifies a number of subtle issues arguably obscured in various early responses to, and replies from, Walton. Scepticism about photography's epistemic value is vigorously defended by Roger Scruton in Scruton 1981. This paper is likewise best understood when read in conjunction with later clarificatory replies by Scruton, including Scruton 2009. Key works on the epistemic value of photography include: Cohen & Meskin 2004, Abell 2010 and Walden 2005. Key works on the affective nature of photography (in addition to Walton 1984) include: Hopkins 2012, Pettersson 2011 and Currie 1999. Edited collections include: Walden 2010 and a special issue of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Costello & Lopes 2012. Papers in the latter address a number of new issues in the philosophy of photography, suggesting those working in the area are beginning to move beyond the traditional issues of transparency, aesthetic scepticism and epistemic value. Notable monographs include: Maynard 1997 and Friday 2002. Three monographs in the philosophy of film that discuss photography at length are: Currie 1995, Carroll 2008 and Gaut 2010. The latter is especially notable for its theorising about the nature of digital photography.

In this paper, I develop a unified account of cinematic representation as primary depiction. On this account, cinematic representation is a distinctive form of depiction, unique in its capacity to depict temporal properties. I then explore the consequences of this account for the much-contested question of whether cinema is an independent representational art form. I show that it is, and that Scruton’s argument to the contrary relies on an erroneous conception of cinematic representation. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

There is a variety of epistemic roles to which photographs are better suited than non-photographic pictures. Photographs provide more compelling evidence of the existence of the scenes they depict than non-photographic pictures. They are also better sources of information about features of those scenes that are easily overlooked. This chapter examines several different attempts to explain the distinctive epistemic value of photographs, and argues that none is adequate. It then proposes an alternative explanation of their epistemic value. The chapter argues (...) that photographs play the epistemic roles they do because they are typically rich sources of depictively encoded information about the scenes they depict, and reliable depictive representations of those scenes. It then explains why photographs differ from non-photographic pictures in both respects. (shrink)

Alinder provides calibrated readings of the photographs from this period, including works by Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, Manzanar camp inmate Toyo Miyatake (who constructed his own camera to document the complicated realities of camp life) ...

Drawing upon the notion of the uncanny, this article examines my documentary photography concerning the ‘everyday’ indeterminate and potentially ominous spaces around the London transport system following the bombing incidents on the 7th July, 2005. The photographs consist of reframing images found which draw attention to the lingering reminders of terrorism within the cityscape. This paper examines also how issues of representation, race, suspects, victims, protest,defiance and accusations can be evoked in the ficto-critical use of urban documentary photography.

Most instructors who teach introductory courses in aesthetics or the philosophy of arts use the visual arts as their implicit reference for "art" in general, yet until now there has been no aesthetics anthology specifically orientated to the visual arts. This text stresses conceptual and theoretical issues, first examining the very notion of "the visual arts" and then investigating philosophical questions raised by various forms, from painting, the paradigmatic form, to sculpture, photography, film, dance, kitsch, and other forms on the (...) borders of the visual arts. The selections represent both classical and contemporary views and include sections by artists, art historians, and critics as well as philosophers. A singularly important text for courses in the philosophy of arts or aesthetics, this anthology is designed to enrich the philosophical and critical examination of our beliefs about the visual arts. (shrink)

The point of departure of Berger and Mohr’s Another Way of Telling is what they call the discovery that ‘photographs did not work as we had been taught’. Since their book was written, the same feeling of ‘discovery’ has been expressed in other writings on photography. Often, these ‘discoveries’ have been linked with the way ‘ordinary’ people have been using photography. This paper addresses this recurrence and asks what are the discursive conditions under which this understanding of photography has been (...) perceived as a ‘discovery’ whenever it has surfaced in the last 30 years. The paper analyzes the conceptual grid within the hegemonic discourse on photography that has contributed enormously to the marginalization of this new understanding of photography — the common opposition between the ‘aesthetic’ and the ‘political’, and accordingly between two seemingly contradictory judgments: ‘this is too political’; ‘this is too aesthetic’. These judgments, applied frequently to photographs taken in zones of ‘regime-made disaster’, usually differ and sometimes completely prevent the possible encounter with the photographed people who, through the photograph, are co-present with the spectators in the event of viewing the photograph. (shrink)

This introduction to a special section on ‘Photography and the State’ reflects on trends in photography theory exemplified in essays by Jens Andermann, Ariella Azoulay, Andrea Noble, and Bronwyn Law-Viljoen. It suggests that the contributors make a powerful argument for photography’s emergent contribution to theories of the state and of sovereignty. It situates this work in the context of a growing body of scholarship attuned to photography’s role in political imagination in post-colonial and post-imperial spaces, and underscores movement of the (...) field away from inter-subjective conceptions of photographic ethics and debates about indexicality. (shrink)

This paper presents an argument for seeing Marcel Duchamp and Robert Mapplethorpe as opposite ends of a tradition of negotiation of art with its conditions of production. The piece takes seriously Kant's suggestions concerning the fine arts and contests views of art that see the Kantian tradition as formally fixed.

Photography’s unique relationship with time, the idea of fixing an image in time has been altered with the invasion of digital technology. How revolutionary is the idea of the digital? What essentially differentiates the idea of a stilled moment in time with its (digital) potentiality to reverberate and pulsate within the same frame? From the capturing to the processing and printing, images are subjected to open-ended alterity. Discussing this through the work of Belgian artist David Claerbout and with reference to (...) Simondon’s L’individu et sa genese physico-biologique and Agamben’s What is an apparatus the notion of diffracted and shimmering time will be explored, one that is conditioned and at the same time, conditions the notion of subjectivity. (shrink)

From Alfred Stieglitz to Trevor Paglen, photographs of the sky have engaged with the relationship between abstraction and representation. This article argues that Stieglitz’s attempt to convert the ‘natural’ abstraction of the sky into the ‘cultural’ abstraction of the modernist image opens a space through which recent photographers have moved to use the sky photograph as a means of interrogating issues of openness and concealment that are at once aesthetic and political. The invisibility of signs of military-industrial power embedded within (...) airspace is, in Richard Misrach’s and Paglen’s photographs, registered but not exactly shown, since the capacity of the photograph to reveal the unseen is challenged by the effectiveness of contemporary modes of concealment. What is shown in these images, however, is the condition of hiddenness itself, which is encountered by Misrach and Paglen not only through the abstraction of the sky photographs but by situating those images within a discursive field – through the use of titles, captions and an explication of working methods – that regrounds the atmospheric as a spectacular function of power’s open secret. (shrink)